Conveyor lines are employed in a variety of industries to move items from place to place where work is performed on them. By way of example, package forming and filling machines may discharge filled packages to numerous feet of conveyor lines which transport the packages to distribution equipment.
At specific points along the conveyor line the containers may be subject to sudden changes in speed, bumps or downward slopes as the container is transferred between conveyor belts or from a work station to a conveyor belt. This may cause the containers to tip over or fall against an adjacent container on the line. Any tipping of the containers on the conveyor line can cause product loss, equipment damage, and costly downtime in production. All of these losses tend to increase production costs.
Conveyor line equipment manufacturers have attempted to solve the problem of packages which are rotationally misaligned on a conveyor belt. One such conveyor alignment mechanism is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,113,994. Another alignment mechanism is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,838,408. These systems may be effective as to rotationally misaligned packages but they do not solve the problem of tipping packages. These systems may even increase the possibility of packages tipping since they engage the lower leading portion of a moving package thereby causing a package with a higher center of gravity to tip over.
There are existing systems which will detect a fallen package. Rather than attempting to right the package, however, the package is ejected from the conveyor line. This type of system is both wasteful and inefficient. A mechanism which will right tipped packages has not, to this point, been disclosed.